


a chance at normal

by eg1701



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, M/M, just a couple captains being captains, set during endgame, they're friends ok?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 17:27:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19322788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eg1701/pseuds/eg1701
Summary: carol gets steve talking about life and love and what thanos took and what he  might still be able to have





	a chance at normal

**Author's Note:**

> listen i just wanted them to interact beyond, like, the captain marvel end credit scene and i think they have some things in common and endgame steve in the last ten minutes of the movie? never heard of 'im.

Steve Rogers thought Carol Danvers was great.  


Even if she wasn’t as powerful as he had seen (and he had a suspicion she wasn’t even going full out and they had yet to see what she could really do) he thought she was a good fit, liked her confidence, liked the way she didn’t screw around and wanted to get the job done.  


He didn’t think that she really wanted to be friends with them, maybe allies, colleagues, perhaps even acquaintances, but Carol had a job, a life out there in the universe, and he thought once they brought everyone back (please, dear God, he thought, we have to bring them back) she’d smile and salute them and take off in a burst of flame and light to do whatever it was the universe needed, maybe dropping in on her way to another galaxy if Earth was on the way.  


“Captain,” she came over, jolting him out of his thoughts, “Can I join you?”  


She was holding a mug of coffee, and he moved over on the sofa so she could sit down. She set the mug down carefully, and rolled her shoulders, cracked her neck and offered him a smile.  


“You guys always train like this? That Thor sure is a tough guy. The lightning shit is badass.”  


“Oh yeah,” Steve forced himself to smile, “Well he’s a god after all. You should have seen him against Thanos.”  


“You alright?” she asked, “Awfully quiet.”  


“Fine,” He replied, “Just, you know.”  


“Grieving.”  


“Yeah.”  


She nodded, “You know Captain America was a legend in the military, at least in my day. Kind of like an urban legend, only one you knew existed at one point, but somehow seemed impossible. We used to joke all the time about you. If things were different when I showed up I might have freaked out just a little.”  


Steve didn’t know how to reply. When he’d woken up out of the ice, he really hadn’t expected anyone to remember Captain America and that would have been just fine with him. He had gone into the ice expecting not to wake up, and instead he had woken up seventy years in the future, to a world that made him, a kid who was nothing special, a legend.  


“I never wanted all of that,” he sighed and ran a hand over his face. When was the last time he slept properly? Last week? Before Thanos? 1935? How had things gone so bad so fast? If he could go back in time, what would he change? Would he go back and stop himself from ever trying to join the army? Maybe he’d go back and they’d run off to some place where the army would never find Bucky and they could have had a normal life.  


Normal seemed like a foriegn word to him now, something so out of reach it might as well not exist at all.  


“The best ones never do,” she said, “But it’s why they’re the best. Talk to me Captain, what’s going on. Who’d you lose? Don’t just say we all lost people and friends, or I’m going to smack you. You can be sad about everyone, but someone has you hurting. Big time. You’ve been doing a lot of sitting and staring, and it might help to talk.”  


He pulled out his phone and opened it, handing it over to her. It was the most recent photo he has of Bucky, taken a week or so before the snap. They had been so happy in Wakanda, Bucky more than he had probably since before the war. You could just see one of the goats in the background, the sun beginning to set. 

Someone, maybe T’Challa had told him to watch the sunset as often as he could, because of how beautiful it was.  


“That’s Bucky,” he said. It felt odd, in a way, to introduce him that way. That’s Sergeant James Barnes, that's the Winter Soldier, the White Wolf, but to Steve he’s always been Bucky, “It’s about the third time I’ve lost him and I’m wondering if this time it might stick. I lost him.”  


“You know,” Carol kicked her feet up on the coffee table, “When I got back to Earth, after my time with the Kree, I met up with a woman named Maria. I didn’t remember her at first. All my memories were fuzzy at best, but she pulled it out of me, my name, my time with her in the Air Force, at home. And so I know very well what that look means. So tell me again, who’d you lose? And tell me who he is to you.”  


“The love of my life.”  


“There we go,” Carol clapped him on the back, a friendly gesture that he relished, since a good portion of his close friends were dust, “It’s alright. Did you know that’s legal now? That you can’t get thrown out of the military? That you can get married? When I found that out I nearly passed out on the spot. Maria laughed at me.”  


He should have been annoyed at her positiveness, her optimism, but he couldn’t help smiling back. It had been hard since everything, and everyone had taken to moping around, essentially giving up. Words were few and far between, smiles even rarer. Steve couldn’t blame them, especially since he was doing the same thing, but at this rate they would never do anything, and an eternity would pass with half the population gone or dead or wherever they were now.  
But Carol had confidence he hadn’t had in a long time. That Steve who had marched into a HYDRA base with a stage prop because there was a chance Bucky might have been alive seemed to be a different person. When had he become this version of himself?  


Maybe she was too cocky, maybe all they could do now was to help the people that were left. But maybe that was alright too, her attitude. Maybe they needed it.  


“Yeah,” he cracked a smile, “I was surprised too. No one thought to tell me, so when I heard about it for the first time, I had to look it up to see if they were just kidding.”  


“So, obviously we’ll get back your Bucky and all your other friends, and everyone’s people, and you can invite Maria and me to the wedding. Deal?”  


She stuck out her hand and he shook it.  


“Deal Captain.”  


“Wonderful to hear Captain,” she nodded, “I was looking for someone else who’d be willing to spar with me, and I thought you might like it?”  


“Sure,” He stood up and pulled on a sweatshirt, “Let’s go.”

*** 

“I’m thinking about retiring,” Steve said, dodging a blow and faking left, “After this. I keep promising Bucky I’m gonna do it, give up the shield, although I don’t technically have that anymore. It’s more of a metaphor anyway.”  


Carol paused, and frowned, “Why?”  


“I don’t want to do it anymore.” It sounded strange coming from his mouth. He had thought it before, in Sokovia, when he looked at Pietro’s body after he’d told the kid to walk it off, not thinking he’d actually die, in Siberia, when he had driven his shield into Tony’s arc reactor, someone who had been his friend, on the helicarrier when he’d nearly let Bucky kill him. When his knees his the ground in Wakanda, because they had lost, for the first time, they had lost.  


“You’ve had it for a long time. I’m not surprised. Are you going to give it someone?”  


“I was thinking about Sam,” he replied, reaching for a drink of water, “You’d like Sam, he was in the Air Force too. I don’t know if he’d be too receptive at first, but he’d make a damn good Captain America.”  


“What held you back before?”  


Steve shrugged, “I’ve been Captain America for so long, I didn’t know how to be Steve Rogers in the 21st century without it. But I feel like I’ve aged twenty years in the past few months, and if not only bring everyone back, but survive whatever we have to do, I’m telling Bucky I’m retiring, and we’ll find somewhere nice, maybe Wakanda, maybe Brooklyn, maybe somewhere we’ve never been, and maybe finally have something resembling normal.”  


“We’ve got a house in Louisiana,” Carol said suddenly, “ A kid and everything. It can be done.”  


“You have no idea how glad I am to hear that.”


End file.
